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greenwashing

Jon Faine surprised many Victorians yesterday morning (4 September 2012) when he lambasted the abuse of 457 Visas in Victoria at a time of high local unemployment. He drew listeners' attention robustly to the folly of importing thousands of workers to industries where Australians could not even afford to train. Today, 5 September 2012, on ABC Radio 774, his guest was the Executive Director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI), but we heard not a word about how mass immigration is driving Australia's housing shortage nor how the property development growth lobby is driving mass immigration and the destruction of Victoria's green wedges and other greens spaces. Should we expect more of Jon Faine and the ABC or are ABC announcers constrained to toe the government line that supports the property development lobby?

Malcolm Muggeridge once wrote scathingly about the English socialists who praised the achievements of Stalin's Russia after a brief guided tour of the workers' paradise. Pity that he is not alive to write about Anna Bligh's mischaracterization of Vancouver. It is time that foreign growth boosters were called out on their use of the "Vancouver model" as a showcase for "green development". It is goddam lie. Bligh and the growth-management industry of urban planners who parrot this line should be shipped to Vancouver and made to live their on the subsistence income that four in ten Vancouverites struggle to survive on.

To read the Royal Bank's website, one might confuse this commercial goliath with the Sierra Club or Friends of the Earth. A bank that in 2006 had a net income of $4,6 billion presents itself as the Jolly Green Giant of corporate Canada.